
The first official meeting consisted of election of officers and board members. The board members
present at this meeting were E. P. Estes, elected president, L. I. Griffin, elected secretary, and the
remaining board members were William J. Bain, E. B. Dawson, Earl M. Dawson, Burney Moore, and
Robert P. Garret. The Chairman, E. P. Estes, reported at this meeting that the original copy of the
Articles of Incorporation were filed on November 19th, 1937 in the office of the Secretary of State,
and that under the date of November 19th, 1937, the Secretary of State had issued a Certificate of
Incorporation to the incorporators.
View the »NCEC Bylaws.
Beauford H. Jester was appointed by the board to be counsel of the new Corporation. The
Cooperative was organized to be a private, non-profit enterprise, locally owned and managed, and
incorporated under state law, to be controlled by the members it serves, with each member having
one vote in the affairs of the Cooperative. The cooperative membership elects a director for a
designated area to be their representative on the board.
The first step after the organization was to secure funds to build electric distribution lines in the rural areas. The funds were provided
under the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, which established the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) as a lending agency for the
federal government. The first request for funds was $100,000 to build 92 miles of distribution line in Navarro and Hill counties.
NOTE: Todays cost would be well over $2,000,000.
In 1944, Navarro joined Brazos Electric Cooperative becoming one of the 16 owners of what is now the largest Generation and
Transmission Cooperative in Texas. Navarro purchases its wholesale electricity from Brazos.
The Cooperatives first office was in the Jester Building on West 5th Avenue in Corsicana. The first building was at 214 N. Main Street.
Later in 1949, the Cooperative purchased the property at FM 744 and Highway 22 for its pole yard and communication tower, and then
built a new office-warehouse facility at 319 West 7th in 1950. In 1975, the Cooperative moved to its present location on west Highway 22
on the western edge of Corsicana. In 2007, the Cooperative added approximately 3,000 square feet to the Hwy 22 facility.
From this humble beginning, the Cooperative has grown to almost 3,000 miles of line serving more than 16,000 meters in Navarro, Hill,
Ellis, Freestone, and Limestone counties.
1937-1941 1941-1946 1946-1960 1960-1975 1975-1979 1979-1984 1985-2003 2003-Present
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Clyde Kimes Ben Templeton Osie Cauble Raymond Hampel, Jr. Joe Felder Max Graham Billy Gillespie Billy Jones
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Past and Present Managers of NCEC
History of Navarro County Electric Cooperative
In the early 1920's farm leaders began pressing for rural electrification. If existing investor-owned power companies wouldn't help the
farmers, the farmers would help themselves. They began to organize their own electric cooperatives. Farmers in Navarro County
started to work in 1936 to organize a cooperative to serve their needs. The first recorded meeting of the incorporators and directors of
the Navarro County Electric Cooperative, Inc. was held in Beauford Jester's office in the Jester Building in the city of Corsicana, TX,
Navarro County at 2:30 pm on the 26th day of November 1937.
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